


blood that I shed

by gogollescent



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-16 17:28:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9282395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: For the prompt, "Stephen, a moment's respite."





	

On one occasion the gentleman took him on a quest. Stephen was never told what the gentleman sought and, because it was early in the term of his enchantment, he made a solitary game of not asking. He had already almost exhausted the power of flattering professions of interest; he had apologized for his stupidity too often to hope it might prompt a clear answer. Apologies inspired the fairy in other ways. More than any thing else in the world, it moved the gentleman to learn he had been wronged.

Stephen did not need to be told that the quest was of that consuming character which besets great men (and great ladies) when they can least afford to be consumed. On the eve of a fashionable party, or the morning of a speech to Parliament, a lost button, a fol-de-lol, becomes the Grail which Arthur lost. The drollness in this furor is rarely evident to Sir Such-and-Such or his servants. It was a new sensation, therefore, to be amused by that familiar posture: the silver head bent low, the hands open and closed, the bright eyes fixed on an invisible trail, which led the stumbling feet toward treasure. At first Stephen hardly noticed he felt any such thing. Then, when he did notice, he was distressed; for six months the strongest sentiment which laughing children, pleasant weather, and friends’ praise had compelled in him was regret that he could not go away and sit where all sunshine would pass him by—regret that if he hid his face, the darkness too would dazzle him. And yet his captor wandered Lost-hope’s rainy wood like an Englishman, and Stephen felt an ordinary tremor of good cheer, mixed with a little scorn, as though the gentleman had yet to do him any injury; or as though the hurts he dealt Stephen could never signify.

Thereafter Stephen did his best to subdue fits of lightheartedness. The reader will judge for him whether the gentleman cut a less or more glorious figure than a mortal would, on an identical errand. The gentleman’s properties were magnificent and extensive—but this may not be counted an advantage, when the article sought is very small. The gentleman looked, not behind bookshelves and under wardrobes, but behind the rain, and under the bones of the earth. Rather than perusing his memory by the traditional methods of tapping his temple, pulling his hair, and complaining to sympathetic onlookers that his study had been disturbed, the gentleman performed a very ancient magic to place himself and Stephen in the world of his own recollection.

He retraced his steps through prior decades, which—it appeared—had not ended, but had been sealed off to the public. Throughout he was very silent; at intervals he shrieked. When he addressed Stephen in English, the words proceeded as if accidentally from his mouth, so that Stephen had the distinct impression that a birch tree or nearby candlestick had joined its king in exhorting him. “Keep a sharp eye about you, Stephen!” (At this the gentleman made a repetitive, scraping gesture, as though to hone a man’s eye on a whetstone shaped for the purpose.) “Do you not find eye- _lids_ a very cumbersome detail?”

I have said that the gentleman turned his attention, not merely to places he had visited, but to times. For Stephen it was all one: he could not distinguish between the Sahara of _this_ century and the desert which so disobliged our Lord. The fairy lands the gentleman toured were if possible more enigmatic. Some were inhabited entirely by men and women dressed after the fashion of ancient Picts—but, then, some always were.

In England it was different. Stephen recognized peculiar boxlike headdress preferred of Tudor women, though the lappets in the engravings were neither so beautiful nor so apt to fly up in strong wind. A dizzy half-step through a stone archway, with the gentleman’s hand propelling him, and on the other side Stephen’s ears were filled with the curious, up-tilted English of Richard of Bordeaux’s London.

It would be misleading, however, to suggest that Stephen got his bearings in that hour through the exercise of Reason. The truth was that he always knew when it was England. The vistas of the past did not overwhelm him with homely English _spirit_ , discernable, perhaps, in the dull colors of the stones. A woad-bedecked Celt is as colorful an occurrence as an Easter Island warrior. Stephen had spent almost all his life on English soil, but what he felt from England’s past was a formal awareness of him, as though the land would turn on its side, just as soon as it freed itself from its present occupation—would turn and ask directly, Who are you?

But by means of these sojourns to England, Stephen concluded that the gentleman had begun very far back in time—had jumped forward to the recent past—and had continued in that serpentine way toward an unknown center. There might have been some pattern to his peregrinations through space, as well; perhaps he was circumnavigating the globe, although Stephen doubted whether, in doing so, one could cross Faerie and Hell.

He was beginning to wonder whether they might be lost. Or if they were not, what about the gentleman’s prize? Perhaps it had been swallowed by a sort of Time-monster, who had fled back to Eternity with a bloated gut. The gentleman would pursue it for ever, and Stephen would either go with him or be marooned in a time still less congenial to him than his own. At no. 9 Harley-street the country servants would go to war with the London maids and the butter would remain uncovered until it spoiled in the dish. Stephen could not muster the regret and indignation he considered due to either prospect, but he was sorry to think Lady Pole would tell her fairy-stories without anyone to hear the words she meant.

In the midst of these and other sad reflections, he paid less and less heed to the gentleman’s interrogation of a statue of the Buddha. Nor did he remark when the gentleman had conceded defeat and, raising two hands, waved aside the grey sky, firs, and mountainside.

Now it was night. A great, clear night, in which the slurring of the ocean seemed to climb from below one’s feet, so one stood on a carpet of sound, rolling away to the foot of the sky. An army had made camp on the beach. At first Stephen presumed these were ancient Danes, judging from the very fair heads and immense furs, to say nothing of the long-necked suggestion of ships on the water. On approaching the camp’s perimeter, however, they were met by a woman whose brows swept to her hairline, such that her forehead seemed fringed at the temples with dark fur. Further dark streaks tapered to nothing in her fair hair, like the streaks in blond wood. What Stephen had taken for a black bearskin, sewn with beads of jet, was not a cape but a number of ravens, who shook themselves and glared when the lady undertook to shrug.

Then he knew the camp for a fairy host. But he could not fathom it, because they were in England. The stars shivered like dew and the lateness of the hour meant the constellations themselves were, to a Londoner’s eye, strangely disordered; and it was England. Of course, England had shewn herself not inhospitable to fairies. But he had never seen so many gathered all together, outside the _brugh_. They were as tall and handsome as any of the guests who frequented the gentleman’s balls—which, Stephen had learned, not every fairy was. But he had never met a fairy of stature who could stand to resemble his neighbor. These soldiers wore much the same armor, much the same woollen cloaks, and they shared between themselves a monstrous throng of ravens.

They also regarded the gentlemen with barely-concealed enjoyment. None bowed, though they parted for him. They were not perturbed by his splendid hair or the smart cut of his coat. Indeed the leaf-green coat was changed, in the light of their fires; the silver embroidery flashed and glowed gold, and the green velvet accepted the warm bloom of the fire, as though year’s end crept suddenly over a fair young wood.

Stephen had rarely had cause to give thanks for the numbness brought on by enchantment. Now he was aware that his indifferent calm masked a desperate anxiety, which, however, he regarded with more pity than concern. To slow the wildly beating heart of the thing that coiled inside him, Stephen craned his head to look back at the ocean, that loomed like a black wall behind the escort’s pale faces. Something troubled him about the movement of the ships: they rose and fell energetically, but not in time to the waves—or not only with the waves.

When the gentleman came to the tall, rude tent at the center of the encampment, he advised Stephen to wait for him. His tone brooked no dissent and Stephen found himself sitting on a log. The fairies had built their fires with driftwood, and parts of the flame were lavender or blue-green, as though it had stolen some of the colour from the gentleman’s coat (and other accessories; Stephen was sure he saw heartache among the tangled hues). He drew in his shoulders. Trained to disappear in a well-appointed drawing room, he did the best he could with sand and smoke.

The scout who had greeted him emerged from the tent. She walked straight by him like a child entrusted with a task of some import. Stephen followed her with his eyes, and therefore noted that she moved as through a solid labyrinth, not a crowd. She turned corners sharply. Many times he lost track of her. He was badly frightened when she reappeared in front of him.

Closer to, her hickory-blond hair was less a match for the gentleman’s. Heavy but too abundant to fall straight, it held its tidy curves like a gargoyle’s white spew. When she bowed low, it escaped her stiff collar and drifted down around her ears. She shook it from her face in mute agitation. Rising again, she said a word in a fairy language, which crackled like the fire.

Heart sinking, Stephen replied, “I beg your pardon. I have not had the pleasure—that is, I find—”

The fairy spoke to a raven on her shoulder. It took flight. Stephen said to himself, 'If the gentleman were here, he would interpret'; but he did not hope for the gentleman's return. He only wished to understand. The fairy turned to the pot on the fire, which she removed the lid from. She sniffed the steam, produced a ladle, and ladled some of the cauldron’s contents into a wooden bowl.

Stephen felt acutely the unlikeliness of escape. He recalled a formula the gentleman had taught him. “Oh, I am too full to eat, too sick with grief to drink…” She pushed the bowl into his grip and stood above him, smiling. There was no charity in her face; if he had had to name the feeling it betrayed, he would have said it held a trace of nervousness. But he could not believe that to be true and so he could not find the name for it. All the ravens had opened one eye.

He considered the bowl, which held cider. Under his scrutiny, the lump of butter shrank, in its lacy setting of foam. Stephen thought it unwise to drink—could one be twice-enchanted?—but he dared to breathe deeply of the steam[1].

 

“Stephen.”

The gentleman had a hand on his chin. The camp was silent. The gentleman’s fingers were cool. Having finished with history, he seemed to search Stephen’s wet face for the trifle he had lost.

 

[1] If Stephen had had a magical education, he would have known that the tokens by which a Christian may accept a fairy’s gift are various. As it was, he did not think he had fallen asleep. The fairy departed. He sat very straight on the log, to dispel drowsiness. The camp, around him, made to settle into sleep, fairies stealing into tents or flinging themselves on the soft gray sand; when they were all abed, his mother came to him. He did not know her and she, almost his age, regarded him with mild chagrin before setting a hand on his shoulder. He never remembered it, not even as a king, but I may as well tell you that she said one word to him. Not his name, of course—the country of dreams is contiguous with neither Heaven nor Hell[2]—but a word he was glad to have of her, as he would have been of any word. Also she stooped and kissed the top of his head.

[2] Scholars are all agreed on which nations are _not_ Dream’s neighbors. Otherwise they achieve no consensus, except to say that it borders the sea.


End file.
